The Founding: A Gaunt's Ghosts Omnibus

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Especially when I entered them with very middling expectations - I thought they'd be pulpy action fun, and nothing more.

His memories are bound by a mind-lock, preventing him from revealing vital information about the Crusade. After six days of marching through Jago's desert-like terrain and enduring dust-storms, the Ghosts reach their objective: Hinzerhaus, dubbed the house at the end of the world. The storyline of The Armour of Contempt shifts at regular intervals, between the perspectives of Dalin Criid and the rest of the Ghosts. The Tanith First-And-Only are among the most legendary of these regiments of Imperial Guard, and at their head stands Commissar Ibram Gaunt, unflinching in duty and unrelenting in combat. The Lost sees the very future of the regiment in jeopardy as Gaunt battles the forces of Chaos across the Sabbat Worlds, from rescue missions to the horrors of the battlefield.

I leave large gaps (sometimes years) in-between reading books in a series, even those I rate 5 stars. On Herodor the Ghosts are tasked with protecting a girl claiming to be the reincarnation of Saint Sabbat while assassins close in on her. The forge-world of Orestes, a vital supplier for the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, becomes the battleground of Imperial and invading Chaos Titans.

However, once the flashbacks ended, it took a couple of pages to realize there was a present tense to the story in the last few chapters. The Ghosts survive disgrace on Saint Sabbat's homeworld of Hagia and are entrusted with saving a precious artifact. The set pieces are too obviously tailored to make a one note comment on the character (wow, Bragg is smarter than you think, Larkin gets scared, etc etc), which means the stories themselves come off as uninteresting and not overly meaningful. And it’s all wonderfully described, in prose that carries the screams of battle and the punch of laser fire in its wake, telling us tales without a wasted word, whilst also managing to describe this horror of a gothic nightmare future with every necessary detail to make it feel intensely alive, a lived-in space that is real, from the gothic-cathedral ships plying the space lanes, to the charnel-house of a billions strong hive-city under siege.A" - SFX I was impressed by how he was a master of battle sequences, and still could create ambiguous three-dimensional characters forced to deal with moral dilemmasA" - Pat's Fantasy Hotlist Abnett is the Warmaster as far as I'm concerned! But these stories (and going on to educate myself with endless in-depth, 90 minute lore videos on Youtube) really impressed upon me the dark, hopeless, terrifying tragedy of it all. The second novel in the omnibus, Ghostmaker, serves as belated characterisation for the major characters. Overall, I’d say this is a very well done piece of military science-fiction, which benefits from being wrapped into the dense lore of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.